Teaching: Earth is in trouble and we’re only badly training those who might save us.

If you’ve found your way to teaching. Welcome!!

Lot’s of work in front of you… to provide for yourself (pay’s bad) and to provide a future for your clients.

The deep essence of good-to-excellent teaching (i.e. empowering excellent participation in the world society and the global ecology) is not a significant or meaningful presence. Teaching is not simply preventing fights or rewarding/deterring students –yet that IS what seems to be the reality that burns out, trivializes or chases away teacher potential to be more.

What is more? It is, somehow, to help each student feel more and to be more in ways are socially useful and recognized [a living is earned. [translate that as ” if your “function” is exercised at a significant level of competence”]

It is not athletics [which serves the school’s need for social justification often while simultaneously undermining the developmental functions of the school]. Athletes and all students are misdirected, resources are diverted to a function which is at best a trivialization of education and in the meantime high payoff for students —their finding themselves and acquiring important and meaningful skills– is mainly ignored. Teachers crank out tired lessons, students experience hormonal awakening, deal somehow with various forms of disappointment and student on student aggression, and are recruited into the machinery of a society which is obsessed with consumption at the expense of ecological stability for country or planet.

Was it Nero who fiddled while Rome burned? Meet your spiritual descendents in their billions.

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Goal for Living: Finding an existence that is meaningful and which provides sufficient resources for livable and virtuous existence.

Reaching such a goal does not happen in a vacuum.  The society in which one strives (family, neighborhood, schools, employers, general local social ecology etc) divert or break those with even high survival skills …. and certainly those with lower or absent survival capacities. A bad [read as non-nurturing, indifferent or even predatory] will easily reduce existence to a perilous hand-to-mouth experience in which one’s very existence is at risk daily. Even high merit has little chance against a predatory environment unless the “fighting, defending, escaping and living hand-to-mouth ” set of skills have somehow been acquired.

My concerns extend beyond this real issue because, without a positive set of skills possessed by a high proportion of our co-existing citizens,  even well-schooled-at-dog-eat-dog will go down with the rest of us.

I’m struggling my way to preview the society that does have a chance to survive and prosper in this world we’ve nearly destroyed. In this, which I believe to be a well tended society there will be room for both survival of even its weaker members and for those who’ve signed on to the “we shall overcome” efforts that have been achieved, somehow, as an effective reality in all of Gaia’s human societies.

I would like to think that a democracy could find its way to such a change. I don’t see much of a chance- show me our potency for change here, please– in either autocratic or democratic societies. I would be happy for the world  IF it had any chance to establish societal and educational realities which would increase our understanding of the risks if we continue to live as we do AND the enhance our ability to replace ongoing social structures and systems  which are clearly disintegrating and dragging many down with them (eg. Syria, 2011- 2013).